Various display racks or shelving arrangements have been proposed for completely displaying products to be sold and which permit easy access to the products by the shopper. Many of these prior art display devices have vertically spaced shelves or supporting units which are attached to a vertical wall or the like by means of hinges or catches, whereby they can be swung from a vertical stored position to a horizontal load supporting position. In these devices however, it is difficult to move the empty shelf to an inoperative position due to space restrictions or due to interference with other products in the display. Furthermore, some of these prior art devices are complicated and contain numerous parts which are costly to manufacture, time consuming to clean and are difficult to store in a compact manner. An example of such a prior art device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,825,466 which issued Mar. 4, 1958.
Other prior art display devices have been proposed for stacking bottles in layers, one on top of another, but they present some difficulty to the purchaser in removing bottles from the display and are furthermore objectionable because they do not provide the necessary stability against inadvertent tipping of the entire display assembly. An example of this prior art is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,120,610 which issued June 14, 1938 wherein the tray-like units cooperate with the tops and bottoms of the articles when the latter are arranged in superposed groups in supporting and confining the articles against unauthorized removal from the stand.
Another example of the prior art is shown in the British Pat. No. 10,277 of 1906, but that patent does not teach the use of alternately positioned slots in the trays, the quickly removable center support, nor the rectangularly shaped base.